History of Structuralism

Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present

Francois Dosse

Translated by Deborah Glassman

University of Minnesota PressMinneapolis

London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financialassistance provided by the French Ministry of Culture for the translation ofthis book.

Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Originally published as Histoire du structuralisme, 11. Le chant du cygne, de1967 anos jour«; Copyright Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 1992.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota PressIII Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 554°1-2520Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperhttp://www.upress.umn.edu

First paperback edition, 1998

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dosse, Francois, 1950-[Histoire du structuralisme. English]History of structuralism I Francois Dosse ; translated by Deborah

Glassman.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.Contents: v. 1. The rising sign, 1945-1966-v. 2. The sign sets,

1967-present.ISBN 0-8166-2239-6 (v. I : he: alk. paper}.-ISBN 0-8166-2241-8

(v. I : pbk. : alk. paper}.-ISBN 0-8166-2370-8 (v. 2: hc: alk.paper}.-ISBN 0-8166-2371-6 (v. 2: pbk. : alk. paper}.-ISBN0-8166-2240-X (set: hc: alk. paper}.-ISBN 0-8166-2254-X (set:pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Structuralism-History. 1. Title.B841-4-D6713 1997149'.96'09-dC21 96-51477

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

To Florence, Antoine, Cbloe, and Aurelien

Structuralism is not a new method, it is the awakened and troubledconsciousness ofmodern thought.

Michel Foucault

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

PartI. First Fissures

1. Chomskyism-New Frontiers?

2. Derrida or Ultrastructuralisrn

3. Derridean Historicization and Its Erasure

4. Benveniste: The French Exception

5. Kristeva and Barthes Reborn

6. Durkheim Gets a Second Wind: Pierre Bourdieu

7. 19 67- 19 68: Editorial Effervescence

8. Structuralism and/or Marxism

9. Media Success: A Criticism-fed Flame

ix

xiii

xv

3

17

32

42

54

66

76

88

99

x Contents

Part II. May I968 and Structuralism; or, The Misunderstanding

10. Nanterre-Madness

11. jean-Paul Sartre's Revenge

12. Lacan: Structures Have Taken to the Streets!

13. Institutional Victory: The University Conquered

14. Vincennes: The Structuralist University

15. Journals: Still Going Strong

16. The Althusserian Grid: A Must

17. The Althusserian Grid: A Bust

Part III. Structuralism between Scientism, Ethics, and History

18. The Mirage of Formalization

19. From Explosive Literary Mourning to the Pleasureof the Text

20. Philosophy and Structure: The Figure of the Other

21. The Reconciliation of History and Structure

22. Foucault and the Deconstruction of History (1):The Archaeology ofKnowledge

23. Foucault and the Deconstruction of History (Il):Discipline and Punish

24. The Golden Age of New History

Part IV. The Decline

25. Lost Illusions (1): The Gulag Effect

26. Lost Illusions (Il): Extenuated Scientism

107

112

122

154

179

200

227

234

247

260

Contents xi

27. Lost Illusions (III): The Return of Ethics

28. From Reproduction to Regulation:Heirs to Keynes and Althusser, and the Crisis

29. A Middle Path: The Habitus

30. Geography: A Latecomer Discovers Epistemology

3I. The Subject; or, The Return of the Repressed

288

3°1

3 1 2

32. Michel Foucault: From Biopower to an Aesthetics of the Self 336

33. An Autonomous Subject

34. History Returns

35. The Master Thinkers Die

36. The Crisis of Universalist Models andDisciplinary Retrenchment

37. Structural Naturalism

38. Assimilating the Program

Part V. Time, Space, the Dialogic

39. Clio in Exile

40. A Topo-Logic

41. For a Dialogic

Appendix: List of Interviewees

Notes

Index

35°

391

397

40 8

437

445

453

459

Eighteen

The Mirage of Formalization

The protest against the structural paradigm eventually tarnished theterm "structuralist." Everyone ardently claimed to have never par­taken of the festivities. Researchers presented their work as all themore singular despite the fact that only yesterday they had tried tosituate it within the collective current of the structuralist renewal.Some sought even greater formalization in order to access the veryessence of structure, whereas others undertook to deconstruct this for­malization and give free rein to an increasingly literary inspirationthat slowly but surely edged away from the initial, ambitious efforts atcodification.

The Paris SchoolThe first response-a formalist one-eame in the field of linguisticswith the founding of the Paris School, which inevitably recalled thePrague School, and which, moreover, fit into this historical line: "Thiswas the Paris School and not the French School of Semiotics, becauseParis is a place where many foreign researchers come and realize thatthey share a certain number of things."! Born at the InternationalSemiotics Association, the brainchild of Roman Jakobson and EmileBenveniste, drawing its inspiration from the Russian formalists andthe work of the Prague, Copenhagen, and Geneva schools, the asso­ciation was essentially the offspring of European linguists, despite theinvolvement of the patron of American semiotics, Thomas A. Sebeock.

I92 The Mirage of Formalization

The association sought, among other things, to give Eastern Euro­pean researchers the opportunity to leave the Marxist vulgate on theother side of the Iron Curtain and renew intellectual energies of thethirties in Central and Eastern Europe. The selection of Warsaw asthe site of the association's second symposium was symbolic in thisrespect, and the Poles played a decisive role in it. At the same time,this reunion had the ring of an impossible challenge since it took placein the summer of 1968 against the backdrop of Soviet tanks invadingCzechoslovakia, hardly a propitious context in which to undertakethe establishment of productive ties between East and West. ThomasSebeock, of Hungarian descent, considered the situation so dangerousthat he canceled his trip.

The Paris Semiotic Circle was established a year later. "We talkedwith Levi-Strauss to decide who might make up the nucleus of theFrench Semiotics Association. Finally, it was composed of Benveniste,Barthes, Levi-Strauss, and me. Lacan wasn't serious enough for Levi­Strauss, and Foucault seemed frivolous."2 Unfortunately, Benveniste,who was named president of the circle, did not have time to affectthe orientation of its work, because shortly thereafter he suffered astroke that left him a hemiplegic. His intellectual disappearance andBarthes's growing lack of interest in semiotics-he was leaning moreand more clearly toward literature-meant that the activities of thecircle depended increasingly on Greimas, who was in the Social An­thropology Laboratory at the College de France, run by Levi-Strauss,"If Benveniste had actually lived longer intellectually, the balancewould have been different."! Therefore, Hjelmslevian linguistics, themost formalist of linguistic approaches, carried the day in Paris. Dur­ing the same year, the association launched the new review Semiotica,which was overseen by Julia Kristeva and Josette Rey-Debove. "Ben­veniste and Jakobson needed someone young and dynamic, and theyasked me to take over the secretary-general's duties."4

In the first issue, Benveniste recalled the historical origins of theconcept of semiotics, borrowed from Locke, and especially from theAmerican philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who hadwanted to construct a "universal algebra of relationships."5 But Ben­veniste did not adopt Peirce's ideas; on the contrary, he found the viewthat language was everywhere and nowhere to be too loose because,in his view, it ran the serious risk of condemning any meaningfulresearch to the abysses of the infinite. He proposed the Saussurean

The Mirage of Formalization 193

legacy: "Somewhere, the universe must acknowledge the difference be­tween the sign and the signified. Every sign must be taken and under­stood in a system of signs. That is the condition of signification."6Thus the Paris School adopted Peirce's notion of semiotics while re­maining faithful to Saussure's methodological legacy. Distinguishingbetween semantic interpretation and a semiotic level was a way ofbroadening the analysis of the life of signs to the whole of social life. Itwas a matter of systematizing the Saussurean trajectory, which, start­ing with language, intended to study the other sign systems: "Lan­guage contains society. The interpreting relation, or semiotics, is theopposite of articulation, which is sociological."? Language wouldtherefore interpret society, according to two principles that made itpossible to place different semiotic systems into relationship with eachother: nonredundancy between systems, and the fact that "there is notranssystemic sign." 8

This semiotic orientation did not as yet include Kristeva's distinc­tion between a symbolic level of language in the linguistic sense of ahomogeneous and articulated structure, and a semiotic level, whichshe understood as an unconscious process, something like a drive, ob­servable in the interstices of language as so many marks of undecid­ability and heterogeneity. That would come later.

The Paris Semiotic Circle initially presented itself as the meetingplace between structural anthropology and Saussurean semiology. Be­cause Levi-Strauss favored the group, he invited his semiotic partnersinto his Social Anthropology Laboratory at the College de France. Buthe in no way tolerated Greimas's intention of creating a better sym­biosis between Saussure's linguistic legacy and the semiotic study ofmyths: "This linguistic domination was acceptable for many, includ­ing anthropologists, insofar as it remained discrete and offered con­ceptual tools, but it became intolerable when it became a semioticenterprise with pretensions of covering many areas."? So Levi-Straussquickly gave his colleagues their leave, and "Greimas was forced toleave the office that he had at the College de France."lO

As a result, Greimas's influence grew and the school became her­metic in its increasingly rigorous, self-enclosed formalization, drawingits model more than ever from the hard sciences. Ever since he hadpublished Structural Semantics, Greimas was convinced that he couldreach total meaning and the complete meaning of the structure. In thisconfiguration, the sign became "the transcendental site of the condi-

I94 The Mirage of Formalization

tion of the possibility of meaning, of signification and of reference." 11

Greimas argued that this site could be reestablished with the semioticsquare, a veritable open sesame for any sign system. This dream offormalization took structuralism as its emblem, a crystal whose lowtemperature prevented the dispersion of molecules and nourishedhope that, by reducing humanity to a degree zero, the transcendentalkeys to the conditions of its possibility could be found. "The struc­turalist dream would be death by refrigeration. "12

The school produced a number of semiotic studies of literary ob­jects, including Algirdas Julien Greimas's on Maupassant.P JacquesGeninasca's on Gerard de Nerval.l'' Michel Arrive's work on AlfredJarry,15 and Jean-Claude Coquet's work, which had a more generalthrust.te Literature for the semiotician, however, was nothing otherthan a signifying practice like any other, without any particular val­orization: "Literature as an autonomous discourse with its own lawsand intrinsic specificity was almost unanimously rejected."17 "Forsemiotics, literature does not exist!" 18

Philippe Hamon considered the character of the novel from thisangle, pulverizing it from a semiological viewpoint. He worked out agrid of critical analysis of what he considered to be the manifest traceof humanist ideology. When he dissolved the notion of hero, he did soby applying many concepts that made it possible to establish a generaltheory specifying a semiology of the character and "distinguishingthis semiology from the historical, psychological, psychoanalytical, orsociological approach."19 He defined the character as a sort of mor­pheme that was doubly articulated by a discontinuous signifier (I, me,to me ... he, julien Sorel, the young man/our hero/...) and a signi­fied, which was also discontinuous (allomorphs, amalgam, disconti­nuity, redundancy, etc.). The character's meaning was clear only withrespect to the other characters of the utterance, and not by a simpleaccumulation of characteristics. The study would therefore have todefine the pertinent semantic axes and attempt to hierarchize them."We would thus see classes of distinctive characters, defined by thesame number of semantic axes."20 This enormous construction sup­posed an immanent approach to the literary text, conceived as a con­struction, and not as a given. Literary tales were then studied in theirliterariness, cut off from exogenous determinations and confinedwithin their internal logic. A number of semantic categories, such asisotopy, for example, girded up the analysis. "By isotopy we mean a

The Mirage of Formalization I 95

redundant set of semantic categories that make a uniform reading ofthe story possible. "21

What was clearly an evolution in semiotic analyses of literaturebetween the sixties and the seventies paralleled the changes in linguis­tics during the same period as it moved from a "linguistics of states toa linguistics of operations," according to Philippe Hamon.s- Such a shiftmade it possible to go from a closed conception seeking to point outthe specificities of complete systems to a much more open approach todiscerning the characteristic constraints of this or that communicationsituation. As we have seen, this evolution led to taking the utteranceinto account in different interlocutive situations. But the period wasalso characterized by a broadening of the semiotic field of analysis,which went beyond the literary terrain to apply to all kinds of texts,including legal, biblical, political, musical, and advertising.P

Semiotics was particularly influential in biblical exegesis. Thewealth of work in this area doubtless made it possible to resist the gen­eral ebb of structuralism in the late seventies. Musical language wasone area of predilection for applying the structural approach. "Musicalone could have justified the hypothesis of structuralist work. "24

Roland Barthes in particular wrote an article on Robert Schumann'sKreisleriana in which he distinguished between a first formal semiol­ogy, and a second affective semiology which he believed revealed theway sounds were set into relationship with each other in terms of dis­sonance and consonance.v

Serge Martin, the author of a work on musical serniotics.w took amuch more Hjelmslevian approach. Unlike Barthes, he wanted to dis­cover how meaning is produced within the system itself, by comparingthe major and minor modes, rather than in any external form of scalesand their intervals.

For me, the system represents what we might call being in the world,in Heideggerian language. It's a schematization with very deep affec­tive roots .... What Heidegger says about Kant's arrangement corre­sponds completely to the musical system, meaning that the system isa structure in the logical sense of the term. But at bottom this struc­ture points to a deep affective relationship with the world, and that'sthe reason that music is its expressionP

Thus it was this absent structure, at once essential and unrevealed, thatsemiotics hoped to restore in its signification. It was even possible toprecisely discern the supreme importance of structure in the creation

I96 The Mirage of Formalization

of the Viennese School, where no tonal polarization existed any longer."Contrary to what tonal music meant, musical language is taken hereto come first, with its formal rules of transformation."28 This sketchof the theory of musical language carried the three essential axioms ofHjelmslev's semiotics onto a musical plane.

MathemesIn 1970, the term "semiotics" replaced "semiology" and "structural­ism." It was also at the beginning of the seventies that Lacan dissoci­ated himself from structural linguistics and looked to formalize histhinking to a larger extent by using topology and mathemes.

It will appear, I think, here that the claimthat structuralismcan giveus a way of understanding the world is one more imputation to theclown that is givenus as representing literary history, and that is theissue. But the boredon which it inspired in me, albeit in the mostagreeable way because I was in the best of company, is perhaps notwhat gives me reason to be satisfied.s?

Like the other participants at the structural banquet whose com­pany he esteemed, Lacan, who did not want to get caught red-handed,shunned a dubious label. Instead, he turned to mathematics to leadhim to higher levels than Saussurean linguistics could reach. At thatpoint, he managed to draw together Levi-Strauss's mytheme, the Greekterm mathema (meaning knowledge), and the root of the notion ofmatherne, which implied mathematics. Lacan hoped to definitely quitwhat he henceforth called linguistery, which he considered to be toodescriptive, and by means of total formalization reach the pure Signi­fier, that initial gaping space out of which are formed the knots that,since 1972, he called Borromean. Having temporarily stitched the fateof psychoanalysis to that of the social sciences, Lacan sought out thehard sciences. "The only thing that remained, the sole nourishmentfor the hermit in the desert, was mathematics.V?

Lacan gave more and more seminars on topological figures, in­cluding graphs and tores, and on stage he used string and ribbons ofpaper, which he snipped into smaller and smaller pieces to demon­strate that there was neither inside nor outside in these Borromeanknots. The world was fantasy, and sat beyond intraworldly reality;its unity was accessible only through what is missing in languages."Mathematization alone achieves a reality, a reality that has nothing

The Mirage of Formalization I97

to do with what traditional knowledge has sustained, that is not whatit thinks it is, not reality but fantasy."3! Lacan was attempting to con­ceive of the totality and the interiority of what was lacking in reality,working from within to eliminate the categories of inside and outside,interior and exterior, and of any spherical topology. He tried to use atwist as the basis of his model of the knot that eludes all attempts atcentering. Deeply plunged into a universe of pure logic unfolding fromthe priority granted the symbolic void, "Lacan claimed to escape sub­stantification through recourse to topology."32 With the quest for amatheme, the system of rules and the combinatory belonging to a puresystem of logic made it possible, more so than had linguistics, tofirmly hold the referent, affect, and lived experience at bay.

Some considered Lacan's use of topological figures to be purelypedagogical, a way of teaching psychoanalysis. "The matheme con­cerned the idea of transmission; it was not a question of makingpsychoanalysis into physics. "33 But even beyond the possible didacticinterest of this topological phase, which frustrated more than onelistener, we might imagine that having run into a dead end with lin­guistics, Lacan refused to totally disseminate his reading of the un­conscious, as Derrida had done, because it would have taken psycho­analysis toward an infinite interpretation in which it would havelost itself. He preferred to suggest another direction, with that of thematheme and the Borromean knots, ostensibly a metaphor for theneed for a basic and as yet undiscovered structure. "Interpretation isnot open to every meaning."34 Closer to structure in the mathemati­cal sense, Lacan took one more step toward abstraction and the ideaof a distinct object tied to the operation of specific ideation throughwhich one could deduce the general properties of a group of opera­tions and define the area where demonstrative utterances engenderedtheir properties.

ModelizationWas this recourse to mathematics and to modelization just a metaphoror was it a heuristic and operational move? Andre Regnier asked aboutthe transition from group theory to The Savage Mind. 35 He analyzedLevi-Strauss's use of the concepts of symmetry, inversion, equivalence,homology, and isomorphism, in his Mythologiques, concepts that hehad borrowed from the logical-mathematical realm of knowledge,and whether the use of such metaphors was not in some way danger-

I98 The Mirage of Formalization

ous. This, however, was not the case when these ideas, like that of atransformational group, played a central role in Levi-Strauss's schemeof things. "They (totemic institutions) are thus based on the postulateof a homology between two systems of difference, one of which oc­curs in nature and the other in culture."36

Levi-Strauss had a very broad notion of transformational classand used the term quite freely, focusing on one or another relationshipin the syntagmatic chain depending on the needs of his demonstration.He also claimed "my right to choose myths from various sources, to

explain a Chaco myth by means of a variant from Guyana, or a Gemyth by a similar one from Colombia."3? Regnier questioned thescientific nature of the demonstration, which would mean adoptingnonarbitrary codes and justifying the correspondences: "To under­stand why, if a being is a sign, it has this rather than that meaning....Finally, the 'logics' in question have a rather evanescent existence:they are rules imposed on the links but we do not know what theyare. "38 He included Levi-Strauss in this illusory scientificity expressedby a belief in formalization in the human sciences.

Gilles Gaston-Granger, however, did acknowledge the relativelysuccessful use of formalization, for example, as when Levi-Strauss an­alyzed kinship relationships. His model worked, was pertinent, andlet us understand how marriages were structured by prescriptions andproscriptions. "But what I would criticize in Levi-Strauss is his at­tempt to show us that transformations in the mythic mind create a re­lationship in the same way that algebraists understand a relationship.I don't believe that to be the case."39 Levi-Strauss nevertheless con­tinued to firmly defend modelization. From the mathematics of kin­ship to the logical-mathematical treatment of the units that constitutemyths, he reiterated his confidence (in The Naked Man, the final vol­ume of Mythologiques) in "structuralism [which] proposes an episte­mological model for the human sciences that is incomparably morepowerful that what they have had until now. "40

This use of modeling for examining kinship relationships got asecond wind with Francoise Heritier's work. A student of Levi-Strauss,she considered herself "lucky to find Claude Levi-Strauss, the directorof the Social Anthropology Laboratory. "41 She was able to use awhole range of material gathered on kinship in Upper Volta (BurkinaFaso), and she reconstituted the genealogies of the inhabitants of threevillages in Samoaland. Modelization and inforrnatics led her to theo-

The Mirage of Formalization I99

retical generalizations based on ethnographic material. "The com­puter became an indispensable means for getting to the realities of theway marriage worked in societies."42 Informatics aided her in recon­stituting how society with semicomplete kinship and marriage struc­tures worked (called the Crow-Omaha system): "Confirming Levi­Strauss's intuition, it seems that a semicomplex system of the Omahatype functions endogamously like the Aranda supersystem, whichbelongs to a system of elementary marriage structures. The choice ofpartners takes place in the fourth generation following the commonancestor to two lines of descendants of blood relations."43 With thisthesis and the progress that it made possible in going from the studyof elementary to semicomplex kinship structures, Francoise Heritierdemonstrated the powerful potential of the structuralist paradigmwhen applied in a limited field in the social sciences, and proved thatbeyond the variations of intellectual modes, structuralism did allowfor true conceptual progress, even if it was often accompanied by themirage of the purest formalization, that of mathematical language.

Nineteen

From Explosive Literary Mourning tothe Pleasure of the Text

Structuralism drew its inspiration from the most formalized of thehard sciences. But at the same time, it was part of a new literary sensi­bility trying to redefine traditional novelistic storytelling. With the cri­sis of the novel as an intangible mode of expression, literary theoryand literature drew closer and gave rise to the New Novel. A new lit­erary avant-garde quickly grew up in response and became the crite­rion of modernity. Boundaries between critical and creative activitywere muted so that the true subject-writing and textuality-eouldunfold indefinitely. As Philippe Hamon wrote, "To consider the con­cept of literature between 1960 and 1975 is to write the history of adissolution."! The structuralist theoretical apparatus, and particularlythe linguistic approach, would fully participate in the new literaryadventure, which took the form of reappropriation of language in itsvery essence, beyond any boundaries between genres.

New Criticism and the New Novel: SymbiosisSome structural themes were familiar in the founding principles of theNew Novel: the elimination of the subject, with the exclusion of theclassical novelistic characters; a preference for a space where observedobjects were cast in different configurations; a defiance of dialecticaltime in favor of a suspended temporality, a slack presence that dis­solved as it revealed itself.

In 1950, Nathalie Sarraute published "The Age of Suspicion" in

200

From Literary Mourning to Pleasure of the Text 20I

Les Temps modernes, a title that expressed better than anything elsethe common cast of mind of new literary critics with respect to writ­ers, and which she later took for a major work published by Galli­mard in I956.2 More generally, it corresponded to the advancementof the critical paradigm among all the social sciences. Sarraute ac­knowledged the novel's crisis, and the collapse of the credibility ofcharacters. She compared it with artisanal work based on lived experi­ence, a la Michel Tournier, whose ethnological perspective envisagedcreation as bricolage, rather than the more classical understanding ofmimesis wherein the crush of details draping an inspired author'scharacters in a certain density made them believable.

Nathalie Saraute's work quickly came to symbolize the necessarybreak from the classical novel. Suspicion became the basis for a newrelationship with the different forms of writing in this critical age.And yet, Sarraute's break with the psychologizing perspective of thenovel was less radical than it appeared. She simply shifted its focus,deconstructing character archetypes and personalities in order to betterseize their intimate, underlying beehives of activity. Subconversationsand tropisms were conceived of as indefinable movements below theapparent conversational thread, reduced to a pretext in order toreach-via a relationship of psychological immediacy-the ego's infi­nitely tenuous nature. Although The Age of Suspicion announced theshape of the New Novel, it remained heir to Dostoyevsky, Proust, andJoyce, the great innovators of novelistic writing.

The New Novel did nonetheless turn to the social sciences, draw­ing its inspiration from their decentering of the subject, their protestagainst Eurocentrism, and a configuration that substituted the figureof the Other for the quest for the Same. Conversely, structuralist re­searchers working in their specific disciplines were to use their discov­eries and research areas to make literature. A whole new sensibilitywas coming to the fore, and it led one to think that truth was beyondthe self and that in order to reach it, all the essential relays of knowl­edge needed to be destroyed. As a result, psychology and temporalitybecame obstacles to truth and structuralism became the new aesthetic:Mondrian in painting, Pierre Boulez in music, Michel Butor in litera­ture. Structure became a creative method, the fermentation of moder­nity. Initially outside of creation, structure slowly penetrated into thearcana considered until then to be unfathomable. The tenants of newstructural criticism in fact invoked this new aesthetic and discovered

202 From Literary Mourning to Pleasure of the Text

their predecessors in Mallarme and Valery, because of their sharedconcern for the verbal conditions of literary creation. "Literature isand can be nothing other than a sort of extension and application ofcertain properties of language.">

Literary activity abounded. The Editions de Minuit publishedMichel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon,and Robert Pinget; the Tel Quel group invited Jean Ricardou, the the­oretician of the new novel, to join Philippe Soilers, Daniel Roche, andJean-Pierre Faye. In 1955, when Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques wasbeing heralded, the New Novel was being crowned with literaryawards. Robbe-Grillet received the critics' prize for his The Voyeur,and two years later Michel Butor won the Renaudot Prize for TheModification, which sold more than a hundred thousand copies. In1958, Claude Oilier won the Medicis Prize for his Mise en scene, andthe same year, Esprit devoted a special issue to the New Novel. Eachof these authors obviously had his own style, but they all embodiedthe desire for a new kind of novelistic writing that rejected the tradi­tional forms of the novel. The wager implied that all writers had to gobeyond those monumental literary forebears who seemed to havedefinitively defined literary limits: Proust, Joyce, and Kafka. Anotherdirection for another generation, anchored in modernity, needed tobe found.

The New Novel expressed the profound malaise of having towrite after Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. At the same time, itexpressed a quest for a solution, which it found by placing literarycreation in a mise en abime, in appealing for readerly participation,given the explicit projection of the writer's subjectivity. In NathalieSarraute's 1950 article, this new critical perspective was still informal,but when The Age of Suspicion came out in paperback in 1964,Sarraute claimed that these articles were a collective manifesto of theavant-garde. "These articles establish some fundamentals for what wecall the New Novel today.":'

In 1957, the photographer Mario Dondero captured the image ofa debonair group in lively discussion outside the Editions de Minuit.For readers, these figures represented the new novel: Alain Robbe­Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Mauriac, the publisher jerome Lindon,Robert Pinget, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude OIlier.The classical character had disappeared from literary concerns and theauthor's attention shifted within the discursive sphere alone. His ob-

From Literary Mourning to Pleasure of the Text 203

servations were the product of an immanent relationship to language,and reality was no longer considered outside language. From Balzac'sdescriptive mode to Albert Camus's distanced alienation, a furthershift led to a reality reduced to the writer's discourse on reality. A sym­biosis occurred during the sixties and seventies, during which "the es­sential thing is not outside of language, it is language itself."> In this,the structuralist orientation, which took phonology as an analyticalmodel and linguistics as its guiding science, was a clear influence.

Rather early on, Alain Robbe-Grillet became aware of this en­counter between literature and structuralism, and of the transitionfrom a phenomenological to a structural approach. He adopted JorgeLuis Borges's definition of the difficult exercise of literature: "I amincreasingly persuaded that philosophy and literature share the samegoals."6 In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published a collection of articles thathe had been writing since 1955, entitled For a New Novel,' In it, helaid out the principles he abided by as an author in his own novels­Erasers in 1953, The Voyeur in 1955-and as a literary consultant atthe Editions de Minuit, where he had been working since 1955. Heproclaimed the reconciliation of criticism and literary creation that, inorder to join modernity, had to be nourished on new areas of knowl­edge. "Critical concerns in no way hamper creation; they can, in fact,propel it."8 The New Novel was presented both as a school of thelook and as a school of the objective novel. It promoted a new sort ofrealism no longer dependent on nineteenth-century models such as thework of Balzac. It was also a question of a passion for describing, butwithout describing the intentionality according to which the worldonly exists as a result of the meditation of characters. In this new writ­ing, "gestures and objects are there before being something."? Just asLacan had emphasized the importance of what is suggestive in wordsand the signifying chains, Robbe-Grillet attacked the myth of depth,preferring the surface of things. Description, the same structuralistrejection of the hermeneutic approach, and the same distinction be­tween meaning and signification were all important.

The novelistic revolution shunned characters as outmoded ves­tiges of a bourgeois universe. The nineteenth century had naturalizedthe bourgeois order, but this reign of the once-celebrated individual wasnow outdated. A new era was upon us, an era of "license plate num­bers."!" In this desertification, there was something of the desperationof the period; how could we write and think after Auschwitz? There

204 From Literary Mourning to Pleasure of the Text

was a desire to disengage from the world of being, and the criticism ofmodern technology. Hope took anchor in the universe of forms, fromwhich humanity was decentered, a simple and ephemeral incarnationof an indefinite game of linguistic folds. The writer no longer was abearer of values since "there are only values of the past."l1 The writerwas to participate in a static and amnesiac present like the universe ofthe characters from Last Year at Marienbad, which unfolded withouta past and in which each movement and work contained its own era­sure. Structural themes resonated within this problematic exercise ofliterature: the negation of any search for genesis or origins, a purelysynchronic approach whose inner logic was to be discovered. "In themodern tale, we would say that time is cut off from its temporality....The instant negates continuity."12

Roland Barthes immediately understood that this new literature,labeled literal, paralleled the principles of the new criticism he wantedto promote. In 1955, he wrote a very positive piece on Robbe-Grillet'sThe Voyeur,13 systematically using Robbe-Grillet's novels and Brecht'stheater to promote the "reader's deconditioning with respect to the es­sentialist art of the bourgeois novel."14 The Voyeur accomplished thisdegree zero of literature and history that Barthes had called for asearly as 1953; it portrayed a world of objects suspended on the ob­server's vision, and which constituted a desocialized and demoralizeduniverse proceeding from a "radical formalism."15 This rapproche­ment between literary creation and a scientific reflection in languageproduced a new hybrid, which Barthes called writer-writing.le Thisnew type joined the tasks of the writer (who was to absorb the worldinto the how-to of writing) and those of the writing, which had to beexplained, and for which speech was simply an ephemeral material fordemonstrating.

Barthes shifted the traditional boundaries and located the NewNovel and new criticism both on the side of the writer, and thereforeon the side of creation. Thanks to this division, the critic and writerwere united in a common effort to probe the phenomenon of writingand the different possibilities of language. Structural literary theoryand the practices of the New Novel constantly interacted; for both,the referent, and the various figures of classical humanism, were mar­ginal. The New Novel abandoned sociological verisimilitude in story­telling in order to concentrate on establishing potential tales and theirvariations.

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This symbiosis between a new literary writing, the New Novel,and a new literary criticism would evolve, in the case of the relationsbetween Barthes and Robbe-Grillet, in the direction of a growing dis­tance from formalization and the construction of an objective realism,and a literal literature. Just as Barthes turned toward the pleasure ofthe text from 1967 onward, Robbe-Grillet shifted from an objectiveto a subjective realism as the expression of his own subjectivity be­came increasingly important in his work."? He too practiced an infi­nite game of reflections, the mise en abime of characters, plots, stagedautobiographical themes, mixed registers. He even reproached Barthesfor having misinterpreted his work in 1955, and, to the contrary,demanded total subjectivity: "I have never spoken of anything otherthan myself."18 According to Robbe-Grillet, Barthes was desperatelylooking for a degree zero of writing, and his work offered its osten­sible realization: "My alleged whiteness-which came at the right timeto give balast to his discourse. I saw myself crowned as the 'objectivenovelist,' or, worse yet, one who was trying to be that." 19

Just as Levi-Strauss considered that a myth was constituted by thewhole of its variants, the new novel progressed by repetitions andvariations based on which the different laws of the series were playedout, but always disturbed by the accident that made the tale lurch for­ward on the basis of its open structure. This new perspective gaveliterature a certain autonomy which no longer needed to be demon­strated, committed, or reflected, but that had its value in and of itself.At the same time, according to Barthes, literature could respond tonew philosophical questions, by no longer asking the question ofwhether or not the world had any meaning, but rather the following:"The world is here: is there any meaning in it? ... An undertakingthat, perhaps, no philosophy has managed, and that could thereforetruly belong to literature. "20 Thus, literature would replace and servethe function of philosophy; it would be the very consciousness of theirreality of language and a veritable system of meaning, once it hadbeen freed from all instrumentalization.

Michel Butor's work is a particularly good example of this mix oftheory and practice. He was very involved in epistemology in thefifties before writing his first novel, Milan Passage, in 1954.21 He wasworking on an advanced degree in philosophy in 1948, under theguidance of Gaston Bachelard, on the topic "Mathematics and theIdea of Necessity." His doctoral thesis, under Jean Wahl, was entitled

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"Aspects of Ambiguity in Literature and the Idea of Signification."When he began writing novels, he gave up neither theory nor philoso­phy and considered that the novel was research, an attempt at prob­lematization. This was true for his first novel, in which he problerna­tized space based on a seven-story Parisian apartment building. In hissecond novel, The Use of Time,22 time was the central character. In1960, he explicitly returned to literary theory with his "Essays on theNovel."23 In 1962, he published Mobile,24 orienting his deconstruc­tion of the classical novel by introducing different styles into the samestory, juxtaposing sentences, quotations, press articles, collages, mon­tages, and capital letters dispersed across the page. Barthes applaudedthis revolution that attacked the very idea of the book, after havingdeconstructed classical novelistic narration. He thought that Butorhad dared to address essential elements by taking on typographicalnorms. "Tampering with the material regularity of the work is to takeon the very idea of literature. "25

With Mobile, Butor proposed a new aesthetics, that, like a river'sflow, overran the banks containing the tale. Beyond the linear devel­opment that gave it an ever-increasing but predictable flow, it variedquantitatively. By contrast, he proposed an aesthetics of discontinuityand juxtaposition.

Structuralism and the New Novel shared a concern for writingper se. This was considered the means for developing critical weap­ons, so much so that Jean Ricardou proposed the term "scriptural­ism"26 for this gush of textuality, as the common perspective of thesocial sciences and literature.

The Novel of the Human SciencesCommitted structuralists in the social sciences lived this rapproche­ment with literature so deeply that they took their work to be creative.Deeply moved by a concern for style, the great novels of the periodwere essentially works in the social sciences. Tristes Tropiques wasinitially a novelistic project and Levi-Strauss was acutely concernedwith the formal aspects of his work, conceived as a musical or pictor­ial enterprise. Mythologiques had the form of a musical compositionwith different motifs profoundly inspired by musical development.Lacan's baroque style was deeply affected by his work at Le Mino­taure, a surrealistic art review in the interwar period where he rubbedshoulders with Eluard, Reverdy, Picasso, Masson, and Dali, among

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others, and later was fascinated by the work of Georges Bataille,whose former wife, Sylvia, he married.

Bataille's experiments with the limits of writing and a barely com­municable strangeness fascinated Lacan. Bataille was interested in lib­erating a constant transgression of rational, social taboos, includingthe figure of the Other, which reveals itself in the erasure of the selfand its traps. He was also an important author for Michel Foucault'sstyle: "Blanchot, Artaud, and Bataille were very important for mygeneration. "27 These authors showed how to shift literary boundariesof thinking, to move beyond limits, and to destabilize common beliefsby finding breaking points. Examining reason by looking at madness,medicine from the perspective of death, the law from the point of viewof crimes, the penal code as seen from prison-these reversals wereonly possible thanks in part to the experiments going on in literature,and, as far as Foucault in particular was concerned, thanks to Mau­rice Blanchot's work.

As early as 1955, Blanchot defined The Space of Literature-i asthat indefinite space within which a work exists in itself, revealingnothing more than its own existence. Like the New Novel, Blanchotrejected the idea of a dialectical relationship with time: "The time ofthe absence of time is not dialectical. What appears is the fact thatnothing appears."29

Foucault paid homage to Blanchot in 1966 as the writer of an im­personal literature with which he completely identified, along with thecurrent of structuralist thinking that defended literariness.>? "Thebreakthrough in the direction of a language in which the subject is ex­cluded ... is an experiment that is taking place today in a number ofdifferent cultural sites."3! Blanchot's writing of exteriority, whichplaces the reader in an initial emptiness, achieved what Foucaultwanted to pursue in philosophy: not to use negation dialectically butto make the object of discourse move outside itself, to the other side ofobservation, in its interior, in "the trickle and the distress of a lan­guage that has always already begun."32 Blanchot and Foucault'sshared critical activity took the form of suspended meaning, absentfrom its present, perceivable in its lack. It was no longer a question ofseeking an ultimate, profound meaning. Both writers often used therhetorical figure of the oxymoron, whose effect is both critical andaesthetic. We also see the structuralist and formalist givens, the refusalof all instrumentalized and ordinary language. To the contrary, the

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work was to try and "accomplish itself in its own experience,"33 by re­jecting the notion of values in order to reach a level where history wasabolished and the present was heralded.

Blanchot and Foucault both bespoke Nietzschean influence. Bothrejected reigning values and feared being eo-opted. A double negationresulted: negation of values, and negation of the negation, which led tofrequent use of the oxymoron: "pregnant emptiness," "placeless space,""unfinished accomplishment," and so on.34Textualism sheared of val­ues, common to the new novel and to structuralism, found a source ofinspiration and a particular aesthetic here. Like the literary avant­garde, philosophical formalist practice could boast of having no exter­nal finality and could thus claim to offer a discourse that reconciledlogic and aesthetics. It could also shift the boundaries between litera­ture and rational thinking.

When "the being of literature is nothing other than its technique,"35as Barthes put it, nothing separates critical structuralist activity froma writer's creativity. So we can see how structuralist works could beread, despite their author's denials, as novelistic enterprises. But wecan also see how certain structuralists, disappointed or wearied by thesearch for the fundamental structure or the ultimate code, moved to­ward pluralization, especially after I968, in order to give freer expres­sion to their literary inspiration.

Disseminating Philosophical DiscourseAs we have already seen, Jacques Derrida had actively questioned theboundaries separating philosophy from fiction. Deconstruction soughtto reveal textual polysemism, the equivocation of what was said,using the undecidables that explode the boundary safeguards andmake it possible to disseminate a liberated writing. Derrida turnedphilosophical discourse toward language and oriented it toward agreater and greater aestheticization.

In the sixties, Derrida was interested in hunting down logo­centrism and phonologism, especially in the work of those claiming tobe structuralists. Over time he became increasingly motivated by thepleasure of writing: "I am trying to find a certain economy of pleasurein what we call philosophy."36 This was the pleasure of literary inven­tiveness and and it was at the very center of the transgression of limits.In I972, Derrida put his own textual work beyond the limits of the

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canon: "I will say that my texts belong neither to 'philosophy' nor to a'literary' register." 37

Disseminating philosophical discourse barely distinct from liter­ary writing was particularly palpable in Derrida's 1974 Glas.3 8 Wefind the same deconstructive vision of the book as a hermetic universeas in Michel Butor's work, the juxtaposition of different typographies,of parallel columns with different contents. With neither beginning,nor end, nor story, nor characters, Glas was primarily a formal searchthat was joining in the adventure of the New Novel. "The rain chasedaway the spectators who scatter in all directions. What is the issue,finally? To talk about the Scotch broom for pages and pagesr-? Tointerpret or execute it as a piece of music? Whom are we trying tofool?"40 Derrida also tried to open up Jean Genet's work't! by takingthe philosophy/literature confrontation as far as it could go in amosaic of separate texts with words dismantled into a true puzzle­for example, cutting the word gla from viaux two pages later.v' Specu­lative considerations, scientific ideas, and "autobiographical frag­ments "43 were dealt out in a sort of self-analysis that took the text as apretext to destabilize the basic oppositions of Western thought. "Asignature maintains nothing of what it signs. Plant a Scotch broomthere, the inscription on the tombstone, the funerary monument is abroom plant: who writes, or rather speaks, without an accent ... 'Yourname?' 'Genet.' 'Plantagenet?' 'Genet, I say.' 'And if I want to sayPlantagenet, what's it to you?' "44

In this new discursive economy, structure was open, plural, andshattered. The notion of difference and Other, which lay at the root ofearly structuralism and research in structural anthropology, hence­forth moved toward disseminating the very idea of structure.

Gilles Deleuze's work made this shift quite palpable in his play onthe notion of difference against the Hegelian notion of unity, and heproposed aestheticization in its place: "We find that the history of phi­losophy should play a rather analogous role to that of a collage inpainting. "45 Difference and repetition replaced identity, reversingHegelianism. Deleuze considered that this demonstrated the adventof the modern world, the world of the simulacrum, the world of anew baroque more attentive to formal invention than to variation incontent. A whole rhetoric of pleasure developed and Deleuze, in awriterly way, ceaselessly produced new pleasures, continuing to playon new notions become concepts in his reading of the world. He

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wanted above all to escape the history of philosophy, and in this heshared the structuralist sensibility. He denounced structuralism's emi­nently repressive relationship to creativity, calling it a "properly philo­sophical Oedipus ... a sort of fucking [enculage] or, which amountsto the same thing, an immaculate conception. "46

In place of shunned Hegelianism, Deleuze also proposed a plurali­zation that must run through writing, and thinking at variable intensi­ties that could be cut up any which way. With Difference and Repeti­tion, Deleuze shifted toward movement in structure: "Treating writinglike a flux, not like a code."47 The impact of May '68 was fundamen­tal in this determination to pluralize in order to give the desiring ma­chines a place in relation to the One, to established thought. Improba­bility and uncertainties took priority, as they did in Derrida's work,but more radically still was the call for a desiring flux. "Writing is oneebb among others and has no particular privilege with respect to theothers and the relationships of current, countercurrent, and collisionswith other flows, of shit, of sperm, of words, of acts, of eroticism, ofcoins, of politics, and so on. "48

Paradoxically, these flows revealed one of the major aspects of thestructuralist paradigm: the absent subject. The idea was a functioningmachine, and the ego yielded to the id of the desiring machine, cou­pled, connected at every point. Codifications and decodifications weremade and undone with neither faith nor laws, polymorphous figures,rootless, slippery monads.

The notion of closure and interpretation was violently attacked in1972 when Deleuze and Felix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus (vol­ume I of Capitalism and Schizophrenia), which quickly became theanti structuralist war machine, helping to speed up the paradigm'sdeconstruction. Immediately and fabulously successful, Anti-Oedipuswas symptomatic of the changes afoot and signaled the impendingdecline. First there was the violent return of the Lacanian repressed.The return of Freud, which Lacan had helped, had privileged the Sig­nifier, and the Symbolic, the notion of an unconscious gutted of itsaffects. Deleuze and Guattari vehemently challenged this approach,arguing against Lacan's dear Law of the Master and for the neces­sary liberation of desiring production. All the same, they acknowl­edged the merit of Lacan's work for having shown how the uncon­scious was woven of many signifying chains and his breakthroughin imposing the acceptance of a schizophrenic flow that could sub-

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vert psychoanalysis, particularly thanks to his objet petit a. "Theobjet petit a erupted at the core of the structural equilibrium like aninfernal machine, the desiring machine. "49 Lacan, less than his dis­ciples and psychoanalysis in general, was the target. Deleuze andGuattari were as sardonic about psychoanalysis as Michel Foucaultand used Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Ageof Reason to set psychoanalysis in a direct line with nineteenth­century psychiatry, which reduced madness to a "parental complex"and considered the figure of avowing guilt, produced by the Oedipuscomplex, to be important. "So instead of being part of an enterpriseof effective liberation, psychoanalysis is part of the most generalbourgeois repression, which has meant keeping European humanityunder the yoke of Mama and Papa and endlessly having to deal withthis problem."50

For Deleuze, psychoanalysis was reductive, systematically drivingdesire back into a closed system of representations. "Psychoanalysisonly elevates Oedipus to the square, transfer Oedipus, the Oedipus ofOedipus.... It's the invariable turning away of the forces of the un­conscious."51 Deleuze and Guattari differentiated between capitalism,which is enmeshed with psychoanalysis, and revolutionary move­ments, which make their way alongside schizoanalysis. For them, asfor structuralism, there was no Signifying Subject, no specific site forany transcendance whatsover; there were only processes. To expressthis opposition, they compared a tree with a rhizome, whose poly­morphic character could represent a different mode of thought, anoperational idea for promoting a new sort of philosophical writ­ing going in all directions without codification. Recourse to logic be­came meaningless; this kind of writing was obviously removed fromthe epistemological considerations of early structuralism, and gavefree rein to unarticulated, disruptive thinking, at the whim of poeticinspiration.

Above all, Deleuze and Guattari criticized Levi-Strauss, the fatherof structuralism, comparing two divergent logics incarnated by the de­siring machine and the anorexic structure. "What do we do with theunconscious except explicitly reduce it to an empty form from whichdesire itself is absent, expelled? Such a form can surely define a pre­conscious, but not the unconscious. "52 Conversely, Levi-Strauss foundgrace in Deleuze and Guattari's eyes because their definition of schizo­analysis echoed his evaluation of the Oedipus complex. They used the

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myth of reference from The Raw and the Cooked, in which Levi­Strauss demonstrated that the true guilty party in the incest story be­tween mother and son was the father who, because he had wanted toavenge himself, was punished and killed. The authors concluded that"Oedipus is first of all a notion of adult paranoia, before being a neu­rotic infantile feeling." 53

Alterity elevated to a mode of thought encountered structural­ism's antihistorical inspiration. Instead of history, there was a veryspecial consideration of space, a veritable cartography of structure asan open system: "Each thing has its geography, its cartography, itsdiagram,"54 whereas time could not be homogeneous, and indicatedan inevitable disaggregation for it is trapped in discontinuous proc­esses that establish its contingent wrenches. "Modes of thinking aboutdifference reject history as a simple surface effect." 55 The fact thatsemiotics at the beginning of the seventies was moving toward textu­ality and the concept of writing also made it easier to express poetic,creative inspiration freed from any specific model, at a time whenSaussureanism, Chomskyism, and pragmatics were facing off.

Philosophical pluralization was in fact contemporary with themultiplication of models and concepts in semiotic projects. The result­ing relativization and ever-deferred hope of finding the ultimate keyconsoled those who had taken the aesthetic path, reinforced by theperceptible crisis since the sixties. "An 'age of suspicion' among semi­oticians reiterates and reinforces that of the novelists themselves." 56

This crisis opened up writing receptive to those who substituted thepleasure of the text for the desire to codify it.

A Philosophy of DesireRoland Barthes adopted this philosophy of desire. For him, the ten­sion had always run deepest in his concern for theory and the expres­sion of affect. With S/Z and The Empire of Signs, he had alreadybegun to pluralize codes and allow a liberated intuition to express it­self in an open system. This new orientation was confirmed and thechoice of aesthetics explicitly announced in 1973, with Barthes's ThePleasure of the Text. A page had been turned. Barthes turned his backon The Semiological Adventure; the writer Roland Barthes could nowfree himself from the writing Roland Barthes and reveal his taste forstylistics even further. He could reveal himself to himself without hav­ing to hide behind a theoretical discourse.

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Barthes thus claimed the writing as space of pure pleasure, asproof of desire and pleasure. He fully assumed his subjectivity as muchin the act of writing according to his own system of tastes and dis­tastes as in the system of readerly reactions in which judgment de­pended on a completely personal textual pleasure. Giving free rein topleasure was the ultimate means of eliminating what Barthes, sincebeginning his research, never stopped tracking down: the signified."What pleasure suspends is the signified value: the (right) cause."57 Ofcourse, he remained faithful to certain of his major theoretical posi­tions and repeated that the author, the writer, did not exist: "Theauthor is dead." 58 The author had no other function than as a mereplaything, a simple receptacle, a degree zero like the dummy in abridge game. Binarity was used to show the difference between whatBarthes called pleasure texts and texts of jouissance. The former fillsup and can be spoken, whereas the latter is an experience of loss, forwhich there are no words. Barthes's important philosophical referencehere is the same as Deleuze's: Nietzsche, who is used to explode truthsbased on stereotypes and old metaphors to liberate the new and thesingular.

Barthes compared the foreclosure of pleasure produced by twomoralities: stereotypical platitudes of the petite bourgeoisie and therigor of groups. "Our society seems both to be satisfied and violent,and, in any case, frigid." 59 The pleasure of the text opened onto theinfinite, incessant intertwining of a creative opening in which the sub­ject undoes itself by revealing itself. "The Text means Fabric,"6o notinthe sense of having to look for the truth on its reverse side, but as atexture summing up its meaning. In 1975, answering Jacques Chancelon his famous radio program on France-Inter, Radioscopie, Barthesrecalled that he had started writing because he thought he was partici­pating in a battle, but that he slowly discovered the truth of the act ofwriting. "We write, finally, because we like doing so, because it givesus pleasure. Finally we write for reasons of jouissance. "61

Barthes was not a pure hedonist; he still had the semiologist inhim and pursued his work on textuality. But his aesthetic choiceshowed a major difference between the 1966 Barthes of euphoric the­orizing and the Barthes of 1973. More than a singular itinerary, thisbreak showed that the structuralist program was losing steam, thatthe crisis of 1967-68 had affected it, and that a solution was beingsought. Barthes's new path announced a certain number of returns

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which would break the surface beginning in 1975. While waiting, likeHegel's aged Greek who ceaselessly questions the rustling leaves andthe shiver of Nature, Barthes reflected on the shiver of meaning "bylistening to the rustle of language, this language that is my own na­ture, a modern man. "62